Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  My great-uncle Walter Lomnitz, medical military officer in World War I, was a pacifist who loved his horse.

  My grandmother Bronislawa (Bronis), for her part, was an opera singer, and a passionate fan of the music of Gustav Mahler. Bruno Walter himself had visited her parents to ask that they let her sing professionally. This was necessary because her father, a wealthy textile wholesaler, was against the idea: he considered a stage career to be something akin to singing in a cabaret. My grandmother’s professional singing career was cut short because of Germany’s rising anti-Semitism in the 1920s, but Bronis later gave singing classes in Santiago de Chile, and she attended concerts and operas devotedly during the many years that she lived in New York City and London.

  With all this, my father had everything he needed to be a perfect yeque; however, and for reasons that I only half understand, Cinna never developed “yeque pride.” As a young boy in Brussels, he quickly learned that having a German identity was a disadvantage. Belgium had suffered a cruel German invasion during the First World War, and the country was at that time anxious about a second invasion under Hitler, which took place soon enough. My father and his brother preferred to speak French between them so as not to be classified as Boches (a derogatory term for Germans). Beyond their ardent desire for camouflage and to lose themselves in their surroundings, I believe that my father was irritated by German/yeque rigidity and an almost universal lack of any sense of humor. Above all, he was averse to what the Greeks called hubris: a sense of pride that ends up challenging the gods.

  Perhaps all of this explains why, when on a certain occasion I asked my father to teach me German, he turned to the back seat of the car where I was sitting and told me that there was really no point. As he saw it, knowing how to pronounce correctly the words ja, nein, and Kartoffel was more than enough. Cinna then asked me to pronounce the word ja a number of times, then nein, and finally Kartoffel. Before long, I was able to pronounce them perfectly. This would be the first and final German language lesson my father would offer me.

  Comme c’est curieux

  Many years later, I had the opportunity to learn more German. I was invited to spend a year in Berlin, at the Wissenschaftskolleg, a prestigious institution that was built to allow professors such as myself the time and mental stimulus in which we might best develop our work. While there, I lived in Grunewald, a neighborhood in the midst of lakes and forests on the western edge of the city, the name of which means “green forest.” Grunewald was an upper-middle-class suburb at the end of the nineteenth century, and there were once a good number of Jews living there. Walter Benjamin, for example, lived at 23 Delbruckstrasse, just a few blocks from the castle at the Koenigsallee, where I was staying.

  My stance on German had not changed from the time my father gave me my first lesson. I enjoyed the sound of the language, and I pronounced it with pleasure and never without emphasis; nonetheless, I refused to make much effort to learn it. If the language of Goethe entered freely into my unconscious, it would be most welcome, but I would make no effort to take control of it.

  The Wissenschaftskolleg offered three free weeks of German lessons. I took them in order to be able to move freely through the city. Beyond this stimulus, I also found it pleasurable for once to take a class instead of always teaching them, and above all on something that wouldn’t be of any lasting use to me. My plan was just to follow my curiosity into the impractical; and after all, it would only be for three weeks.

  The classes were offered in a mansion that the institute owned on the Wallotstrasse. At the entrance, embedded in the sidewalk, were two small squares of bronze with the names of the members of the Jewish family who had lived there. They had been murdered by the Nazis, sent to a concentration camp the name of which I don’t recall. The murder of Jews was ever the companion of theft, and the large house soon became a retreat for Joseph Goebbels’s hunting club. Now I would study German in this same house, and I had even been invited to do so (with all expenses paid) by a public institution under the auspices of the German republic.

  What does one say to an experience like this? Just ja? Of course not. But nein? One cannot deny that the situation is now different. Then it hit me. In the end, the answer had long been given to me by my father: Kartoffel! I remembered Cinna’s enthusiasm for the theater of the absurd, his love for Eugène Ionesco, who will appear in another part of this story.

  Wo wohnt der Mörder?

  My father wasn’t very involved in my education. He never corrected my homework, for example, and I remember only a few occasions when he helped me with a class. The first of these was in Berkeley. I was perhaps eight or nine years old, and I needed to recite a poem from memory. I had been asked to choose it myself, and I had no idea where to begin. To help me, my father opened up an edition of Through the Looking-Glass and read “Jabberwocky” to me out loud, with a good deal of meaningful emphasis:

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gire and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  How fascinating to grasp the drift of a poem so well and yet not understand a word! This was the first poem I ever memorized, apart from children’s songs. My father had a finely tuned ear for the displacement of language, and at nine years old I also had some understanding of this. Why build a bridge of understanding to the senselessness that was for us Germany? It was, in fact, precisely for this senselessness that I so enjoyed the sound of German, which is at once so emphatic and improbable. “Excuse me, sir” is said in a sneeze: Entschuldigen Sie! How could I not love such a singular language even a little? My father arrived in Santiago de Chile when he was thirteen years old. His schoolmates used to beg him to say, “Where does the murderer live?” in German, and Cinna did not understand why the answer — Wo wohnt der Mörder? — caused such hilarity, until he finally figured out that for his friends, the phrase sounded very much like the extremely Chilean expression huevón de mierda (roughly translatable into English as “fucking jerk”), only pronounced with a pompous and very sonorous German accent.

  Where does the murderer live? That autumn of 1938, the murderer lived in Berlin, and his name was Adolf Hitler. But in Santiago, all that German madness seemed very far away, pus huevón. Apparently, at least. While I was at the Wissenschaftskolleg, some colleagues insisted that with or without the language, I was German, because in my house we listened to the music of Mozart and Mahler when I was a boy. They believed that I understood everything even while comprehending nothing. Maybe they were right, who knows?

  Panglossia

  What language was spoken before Babel? What was the language of Paradise? This is a question that has enjoyed various moments of splendor since the eleventh century, including recently, at the dawn of European unification, as Umberto Eco has pointed out.1 At the end of the nineteenth century, the desire to transcend Babel was reborn, yet again, among Eastern European Jews. In Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, Jews suffered intense discrimination, and at the same time they were denied any form of political autonomy. In the nearby Austro-Hungarian Empire, Jews had enjoyed citizenship since 1867; however, Yiddish was not recognized as a language (it was seen as a Mauscheln — a Jewish slang or accent — a failed attempt at German), and anti-Semitism informally took root in the universities and in the government bureaucracy. It is no coincidence, then, that the idea of a linguistic union had resurfaced among Eastern European Jews.

  Historically, the obsession with panglossia has taken two forms: [1] a search for the perfect language (the language of Paradise); and [2] a search for a universal, common language, built on shared features. Among Eastern European Jews, the language debate followed three paths: Hebraism, Yiddishism, and Universalism, the latter propped up by the invention of Esperanto.

  The goal of the Hebraists, to which my grandfather Misha belonged, was to unify the Jewish people
through a return to their original language (i.e., Hebrew), which had the not incidental advantage of also being the language of Paradise. It is well known, for example, that students of Kabbalah consider each (Hebrew) letter of each (Hebrew) word of the Torah to have an encoded divine meaning, and so the language is for them irreplaceable. In addition, Hebrew is both the language of the Torah and of the Promised Land; for this reason, it would serve well as the language of the future for a Jewish people that was then scattered and oppressed. It is no stretch to say that the Hebraists saw Hebrew as the language of redemption for the people of Israel.

  The second tendency, less messianic, was to choose Yiddish. This reflected a political orientation less concerned with uniting the remote past with a projected national future than with recognizing the culture of Ashkenazi Jews as a historical formation imbued with the value of every great popular form of expression. Before he was forced to emigrate due to the implacable anti-Semitism of the Romanian academy, the philologist Lazăr Șăineanu wrote one of the earliest studies of Yiddish. In this study, he showed that Yiddish had existed for centuries in the Roman province of Dacia, and that it had taken elements from all the languages around it, just as Romanian had done. In this way, Șăineanu showed his colleagues that Yiddish was a vernacular language as rich and “traditional” as any of the supposedly “national” languages of the region.

  Yiddishism was for Eastern Jews a form of nationalism rooted in the recognition of historico-popular traditions. Its advocates were not especially interested in finding the Jewish language spoken before Babel — prior to the destruction of the Second Temple and the diaspora — but rather in reclaiming the dignity of popular speech, a goal that implied working to transform Yiddish into a printed language and to create with it a literature, a theater, a learned poetry, and so on. My grandparents were also interested in this path, and it is worth noting that the Hebrew option did not always conflict with its Yiddish counterpart. There were between them common interests and passions.

  The third tendency was even more ambitious and radical. In 1873, Ludwik Zamenhof, a Jewish philologist from Bialistok who had gained notoriety through his work on Yiddish, finished developing Esperanto. He meant this language to be universal, or at least to transcend the ethnic antagonism that divided people in the very heart of Europe. Zamenhof invented Esperanto using a mix of the language families that seemed then to be the most relevant: Latinate, Germanic, and Slavic. He proposed in this way a kind of “Proto-Indo-European” that was entirely new.

  Zamenhof’s universalist radicalism led to Esperanto becoming a target for the Nazis, who systematically murdered any speaker of the language. The communists, for their part, adopted Esperanto with enthusiasm, since their internationalism went well with the idea of universal language. Only later, during the dark years of Stalin’s regime, would its speakers find themselves persecuted.

  The search for linguistic union was nothing short of a passion of Eastern European Jews from the end of the nineteenth century to well into the first half of the twentieth century. Their goals included the standardization and dissemination of Yiddish, as well as the revival of Hebrew (a process that involved rescuing it from its liturgical use in order to transform it into a modern language). They were also open, as it happens, to inventing a new universal language that might transcend national horizons.

  All of this happened long before I was born.

  Alingualism

  My mother arrived in Tuluá, Colombia, from Europe in 1936. She was four years old then, and at that point she stopped speaking altogether. Larissa had spent her first two years in Paris, and the following two in Nova Sulitza, Bessarabia, which was then part of Romania. During her early childhood, she had regularly heard Yiddish, French, Russian, and Romanian. I imagine that she spoke some mix of all of these languages, maybe with some predominance of Yiddish. When her family brought her to a new place that filled her ears with yet another language (Spanish), she gave up trying to find any consistency between all of those languages, and just stopped talking altogether. She remained mute for an entire year, but afterward she quickly came to find herself in the Spanish language as if America had always been her destiny.

  My mother effectively distanced herself from Yiddish and Russian before even fully learning them, and it is for that reason that she did not teach these languages to her children. I don’t blame her for this, yet it is undeniable that I failed to learn two of the languages more or less indispensable for writing this book: Russian and Yiddish. The loss of Yiddish, especially, was simultaneously the symptom and the effect of the dismantling of the Jewish community — how could my mother have retained it while growing up in the Colombian provinces? In all of Colombia there were then fewer than four thousand Jews, and in some of the towns in which she lived — Sogamaso, for example, or Manizales — hers was practically the only Jewish family for miles.

  My father, for his part, had adopted something of a chameleon’s strategy. He was a natural linguist. Even so, it was Cinna who denied me German, the third of the four key languages that I lack for this book. In effect, he refused to extend a bridge to the terror and ingratitude that he and his parents had left behind. I imagine there was a sensibility at work that resembled one of the rules of kashrut: “You will not cook a calf in the milk of its mother.” That is, if you’re going to eat the calf, you must at least allow it some dignity and not cook it in the milk of the one who loved it most. My father observed a kind of inverted corollary of this rule, which might be expressed in the following way: You will separate your son from the language of those who wished to exterminate him. It was in this way that I lost three languages before I even learned them: I lost Yiddish and Russian because of their new status as excessive and unassimilable, and I lost German because of an inclination to avoid cruel or unholy mixtures.

  Finally, unlike my grandfather Misha and my parents, I failed to study Hebrew. In the end, my parents did not send us to Jewish schools, and I have never lived in Israel. I did manage to learn the beautiful letters of Hebrew when I studied for my bar mitzvah. I know the form of the language, but I do not understand it.

  Born in a sea of linguistic dispossession, I retained a bit of my father’s imitative facility. I also have his enthusiasm for phonetics and a certain semantic intuition. I learned, also, the exemplary capacity of forgetting that was practiced by my mother, her pragmatism. For me, linguistic displacement is a mark of origin.

  When I was five years old, I learned French at the Alliance Française in Santiago; at seven years old, when we moved to California, I learned English and forgot my French. From that moment forward, I have remained sandwiched between Spanish and English, feeling comfortable to a certain point in each of these languages, but also insecure in both. Spanish is my Yiddish, and English is my Esperanto, but I have always lacked the perfect language: the one that names things without distorting them. For me there is not, nor can there be, a language of Paradise such as those possessed by the truly great writers, who make their homes in their language. My mother tongue is a linguistic shipwreck; and it is from there that I write the story of my grandparents.

  America

  My father knew a lot about geology, and, according to his point of view, South America is an immature continent. The Andes were to him dizzyingly dramatic. “Mother of stone, foam of condors,” as Pablo Neruda put it. As a geophysicist, he did not find peace amidst such deep stirrings.

  When I was four years old, we took a family trip to Peru. Among my memories of the journey is a stop in Arica, as well as a nauseating plane ride to Pisco. I preserve in my mind an image of the red-chalice desert of Atacama and of the Morro de Arica, the site where the Peruvian colonel Alfonso Ugarte threw himself into the abyss rather than surrender to the Chilean army. And the taking of the frigate El Huáscar in that same War of the Pacific (1879–83), when the Chilean military beat Peru and Bolivia and appropriated their southernmost provinces…In those days, we boys s
till played with lacquered lead soldiers, and as a proud Chilean all of this fascinated me.

  The immolation of Alfonso Ugarte, painted by Agustín Marazzani (1905).

  I remember also an afternoon among the cliffs of the Antofagasta coast, walking with my brothers, looking for anemones and starfish. The sun-filled and freezing Pacific snorted up between the slender tongues of perforated rock. An octopus hid itself in the whirlpool.

  Later, in Lima’s Chorrillos neighborhood, I read a plaque commemorating the struggle of the valiant Peruvian people “against Chilean barbarism.” I was four then and read rather slowly, so that when I finally came to the part on the Chilean invaders, I cried out in disbelief, “Mami, it says here ‘Chilean barbarians’!” (We, good-hearted Chileans, were barbarians?)

  In Lima, we also visited an archaeological dig. My grandfather Misha was there, though I don’t recall how he got there or why. He knew the archaeologists, or at least he knew how to approach them, because they allowed us to touch the cloth that covered some mummies that they were removing. I remember them giving him a strip of that ancient cloth, although I might be mistaken about that. This was my first contact with the magic of antiquity. The dryness of the Peruvian coastal desert can preserve cloth for hundreds and even thousands of years, and it was possible to touch that cloth, to interrogate it!